Excited to be co-organizing the #CHI2026 workshop on augmented reading interfaces 📚✨ Submissions are open for one more week! We want to know what you're working on!

our open model proving out specialized rag LMs over scientific literature has been published in nature ✌🏻 congrats to our lead @akariasai.bsky.social & team of students and Ai2 researchers/engineers www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cool postdoc job opportunity! A chance to work with some great English & comp sci scholars at Carnegie Mellon. Appreciate this ad stresses: chance to do interesting technical work; work on an interesting humanities problem; chance to publish both in humanities & comp sci venues. Looks great, apply!

The bias/variance tradeoff in 2026: Claude Sonnet wrote a program to solve the problem as described; Claude Opus figured out a shortcut from the example data that won't generalize.

[Job 📣] Are you curious about #AI applications in the #humanities? My Print and Probability research group (@print-and-prob.bsky.social) is hiring a postdoc! Come help us develop computational methods for identifying clandestine early modern printers! cmu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/CMU/job/Pitt...

Statistical inference is a rhetoric of counts.

I had the absolute pleasure to visit @craicexeter.bsky.social, where I laid out an argument for how critical & computational scholars should lead the conversation on AI. We need to expand research on harms, interrogate corporate hype, and support people’s critical understanding these technologies

I couldn't figure out eloquent language to describe digital agents that assist with web navigation tasks, so I just wrote "click click" and if I keep this up maybe I will start referring to language generation as "word word"

A very random view into how some people* outside of tech think about and use chatbots. It's not coding, that's for sure, and some of it might sound ridiculous, but I think this kind of perspective and usage is way more common than we might assume. *LA people (sorry, I love LA, but this is very LA)

The second new class I'm teaching is a very experimental graduate level seminar in CSE: "Building Small Language Models". I taught the grad level NLP class last semester (so fun!) but students wanted more—which of these new ideas work, and which work for SLMs? jurgens.people.si.umich.edu/CSE598-004/

For social scientists interested in LLMs for text classification/coding, the process here is potentially very helpful (even if you don't use the product itself). Their core technique: Contradictory Example Training Their training method: Binocular Labeling More details in the linked post below.

The first research paper from WashU's AI Humanities Lab, which I co-direct with Gabi Kirilloff, is available now in the Harvard Data Science Review! Read to learn more about how (badly) current LLMs are at replicating literary style: doi.org/10.1162/9960...

📢 New article in #JCLS 5(1)! 🎉 @axelpichler.fedihum.org.ap.brid.gy, Endres, M. & @nilsreiter.de (2026) “#Interpretation, Argument, #Evaluation. A Workflow for Assessing #LLM-Generated Interpretations of #Poetry” doi.org/10.48694/jcl... #RollingIssue #NLG #CLS #LiteraryComputing

yes, this is a really great paper, showing how AI can enhance individual science but narrow the general scope.

But if this is the case, why are models acting so differently between languages? Datasets like eclektic show that models know different things in different languages. A rare fact is usually only known in the language in which it was seen. bsky.app/profile/lcho...

Do you have ideas for the future of reading? Submit a 2-4 page paper to the CHI workshop I am co-organising! (deadline Feb 12) “Science and Technology for Augmenting Reading" chi-star-workshop.github.io

Reading environments for classical languages FTW

Excited about this Duke AI conference + stoked to present new work on cultural AI. Grateful this high profile conference will include humanistic perspectives. Meaning, history, aesthetics, narrative etc are a part of the society centered AI question. Glad the humanities will be a part of the convo.

✨The NLP+CSS workshop is returning to ACL 2026!✨ And this year, we have a new shared task with prizes! Website/CfP: sites.google.com/site/nlpandc... Deadlines: March 5 (direct), March 24 (pre-reviewed ARR) #NLProc #CompSocialSci #ComputationalSocialScience #ACL2026NLP @aclmeeting.bsky.social

The world must boycott the World Cup and the Olympics. It is both the only moral choice and will actually get the attention of these dead-eyed clout demons.

also, 21 years on from my last comp-lit course: I finally read Lord's Singer of Tales (in digital ed., h/t @dasmiq.bsky.social for the link on a syllabus of his). https://bookwyrm.social/user/agoldst/comment/9290902#anchor-9290902

I'm very excited about our new work which aims to model causes and effects on stories online! Narratives and stories are everywhere, so it's helpful to be able to understand how people use them in nuanced ways.

The next edition of the NLP+CSS will be at ACL 2026! It includes an open-ended shared task (work with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive) with travel grants as prizes!

WE HAVE A BYTE MODEL THAT DOESN'T SUCK

We‘ve seen huge improvements thanks to improvements in scaling and data curation, which admittedly were hard to build scientific careers on. But there’s been no revolutionary shift in methodology since the victory of neural machine translation with attention over ngram models ~2015.

LLMs didn’t move language modeling research from linguists to AI people, they just moved it from computer scientists who thought language was interesting to computer scientists who thought language was boring

Excited to get this work out in the world at #chr2025 (with Sabrina Baur, Mackenzie Cramer, Anna Ho and Tom McEnaney) -- asking: how much do contemporary songs tell stories, and how has that changed over the past half century? anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0...

the original masking objective, or: filling in the black d•t in EEBO-TCP transcriptions, presented at #CHR2025 by Kiara M.H. Liu, Martin Mueller and @mattwilkens.bsky.social

From #CHR2025, I am happy to make public the update of #CoMMA, our corpus of multilingual medieval manuscripts, ran through our ATR pipeline. We updated our corpus with 10k manuscripts, reaching: 2.7B tokens in Latin 560M in French comma.inria.fr But that's not the only thing we did...

Another awesome project, "Print & Probability: Using AI to Identify Printers of Clandestine Letterpress Books." Congrats to chrisvvarren.bsky.social & Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick!

For "Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record", congrats to PIs: Greg Crane (Tufts) & @dasmiq.bsky.social (Northeastern).

Which canonical American authors are the public reading, and why? To find out, we analyzed library borrowing patterns for every author in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (1945 to the Present). Excited to share this new CHR paper & data! anthology.ach.org/volumes/vol0... #CHR2025

Excited to be in Luxembourg at CHR 2025 to hear about everyone’s amazing work and to share my project with @mellymeldubs.bsky.social and our team. We tracked canonical authors and texts in Seattle Public Library circulation data.

🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP

Also, our team is hiring an AI Research Scientist! www.usajobs.gov/job/851528400

“Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record” is among the HAVI projects awarded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social. Congratulations to PIs @philologistgrc.bsky.social and @dasmiq.bsky.social!

I am beyond thrilled to share some good news: 1. I've moved to a new job at UC Santa Barbara. 2. We have been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Both, we hope, will allow us to continue building the work! + hfa.ucsb.edu/news/schmidt...

Excited to present my work with @emilyue.bsky.social at #CHR2025 tomorrow at 3pm! If you're around, please join us. Our full paper is available at: doi.org/10.63744/uNU.... We fine-tuned a BERT model on medieval Chinese poetry to study Shipin, a sixth-century Chinese work of literary criticism. 1/5

At the #Neurips2025 mechanistic interpretability workshop I gave a brief talk about Venetian glassmaking, since I think we face a similar moment in AI research today. Here is a blog post summarizing the talk: davidbau.com/archives/202...

Delighted to share that my co-PIs @danielwilson.bsky.social @mcollardanuy.bsky.social and Kaspar Beelen have been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social: www.schmidtsciences.org/humanities-a...

Big congrats to these 23 projects that just won awards from the @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI program! Please spread the word. (NB I've been helping the HAVI team on this program. This is a broad slate of terrific DH projects!) www.schmidtsciences.org/havi-2025-an...

I gave a new talk on AI, cultural hegemony and the importance of the digital survival of "small" languages online this past Tuesday at University of Copenhagen. Notes and partial slides now online: ethanzuckerman.com/2025/12/05/g...

COMPREHENSIVE and excellent set of slides here - explaining why WoS and Scopus are no longer fit for purpose, describing the changing nature of publishing globally. Relevant for OJS work and diamond OA as well. From @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Accidental bibliography achievement unlocked! (I highly recommend checking out both papers)

Our #NeurIPS2025 paper shows that even comparable monolingual tokenizers have different compression rates across languages. But by getting rid of whitespace tokenization and using a custom vocab size for each language, we can reduce token premiums. Preprint out now!